WeForest.org Gamification

29 August 2012 · by willcg

WeForest.org is a reforestation organization founded by Bill Liao that accepts donations from people and companies for planting trees near the equator. Programmers are needed to work on a project that will gamify the way that people can donate money to the site. Anyone who’s interested in getting involved can email the address provided at the bottom.

This project is going to be a competition between two big companies that are given two big plots of land in the Philippines and they have to fill them up with trees. The first company to fill up their plot is the winner. The companies don’t donate all of the money, their employees donate themselves and then the company donates the same amount.

It’ll go like this: the employees draw where their trees will go on a map of their company’s plot, so if you work in Microsoft, you draw your trees on the Microsoft area. After people pay for their plot, they can then leave a message or a picture on their shape, and check out other people’s donations. This is good not just because it’s fun, but also because people can come back and check out who’s donated trees and how far their company is from finishing the big plot, and if their company is winning. Great for people who are bored at work!

Anyone who remembers how you build things in The Sims will have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. People will draw a shape on an interactive map on WeForest.org, but instead of paying with imaginary Simoleons people will donate with their credit cards, and wherever that shape is on the map, trees will be planted.

The only rule is that if you’re drawing a shape that you’re going to donate, it has to touch somebody else’s shape. That means that the end of the company’s plot is like a finish line that everybody’s trying to reach.Using this rule, there’s a cool little add-on that might be possible: each company’s plot is drawn up with bonuses built in, bonuses that the employees will notice and have to work together to achieve, and when they do their company donates more money.

This could be anything, like the example below, where the employees work together to cut off a little bit of the map, and then the company pays for the piece that they have cut off. Little extra bits of gamification like this will be good because they will make donating money more fun for the employees and get people to keep checking back on the map to see if they can spot any of these opportunities.

This project is still at the early stages of development, all that we have are the pictures you see above, but if anyone is interested in getting involved in developing or has any ideas please email me ([email protected]).